Mourners fill the church for Monday's service. More than half who attended were public servants in uniform. Jensen, 30, was killed Wednesday while trying toapprehend a stabbing suspect. "His last act was to confront malevolence," said Colorado Springs Police Chief Luis Velez, who delivered the eulogy.

Jared Jensens widow and college sweetheart, Natalie, enters New Life Church in Colorado Springs for the detective's funeral.

Colorado Springs police Detective Jared Scott Jensen’s final role was a part he was born to play – a protective warrior defying a villain, as he confronted a man wanted in a stabbing.

“His last act was to confront malevolence,” said Colorado Springs Police Chief Luis Velez, delivering his eulogy at Jensen’s funeral Monday afternoon at New Life Church.

“He knowingly placed himself between evil and the rest of this community.”

After 3 1/2 years on the Colorado Springs police force, where he specialized in undercover work, Jensen, 30, was killed in a confrontation Wednesday with Jereme Lamberth, wanted on suspicion of stabbing Lamberth’s sister earlier this month.

Jensen’s death rocked police, fire and law enforcement officers throughout Colorado. Public servants in uniform accounted for more than half the 5,000 mourners who filled New Life Church for Jensen’s funeral service.

Afterward, more than 1,000 patrol cars, firetrucks and ambulances streamed south from the church to the Police Operations Center downtown in a glitter of red and blue. A few officers tapped their vehicle sirens and waved before they turned onto Interstate 25. Scattered clusters of onlookers waited hours along the route for the procession, which lasted nearly an hour.

Monday was the third time Thomas Jensen attended a funeral for one of his children. Two of Jared Jensen’s sisters died in childhood.

“This is not at all how it’s supposed to be,” Thomas Jensen said, muscling through a wrenching eulogy. “I never believed – I always prayed that I’d never have to go for three of our children.”

He described a man – “my boy,” Thomas Jensen kept saying – who was an inquisitive, intuitive child inclined toward both public service and theater.

At age 5, Jared Jensen took on and bit a 10-year-old bully who never bothered him again. At 8, he said he intended to become an actor. Four years later, he landed a role in a school play. A few years later, he won a spot at his father’s alma mater, a prestigious performing arts high school where Jared Jensen received the Best Thespian Award upon graduating.

At Otterbein College in Ohio, Jared Jensen earned a bachelor’s degree in theater and won critical praise as an actor. His training in theater proved useful when Jensen decided to follow the career path of his older brother, Jeffrey Jensen, a sergeant with the Colorado Springs Police Department.

Shortly after becoming a police officer, Jared Jensen joined the department’s undercover narcotics department, an assignment he relished. The department “is a separate family within the family” of police officers, said Lori Moriarty, commander of the North Metro Task Force.

“You have law enforcement, and then you have narcs,” she said.

Jensen’s vocational brothers and sisters ranged from parking-violation officers to sheriff’s deputies and state patrol officers, from firefighters and emergency medical specialists to police dispatchers who recognize officers by voice.

For them, Jensen embodied the spirit and the letter of the law, the “bond of blue” codified as much by a shared sense of resolve as by the uniforms that included somber dress blues, blue-gray camouflage and the black motorcycle jackets that identified the Iron Pigs, a biker group composed of police officers and firefighters.

“He was an emissary on the side of light, and on the side of life,” said his father-in-law, United Methodist Church minister Michael Padula.

Jensen’s widow, Otterbein college sweetheart Natalie Padula Jensen, endured the service with fortitude, mustering through repeated live video flashes enlarging her face on New Life Church’s many screens.

She listened as family and friends described an ambitious perfectionist, a man who taught himself mountain-biking by “going 30 miles per hour and crashing a lot,” Velez said, summoning the image of Luke Skywalker crashing through Endor’s forests in “Return of the Jedi.”

For an instant, mourners’ laughs rippled through the auditorium.

Marion Vaughan, peering through a door as she stood in the lobby to calm her 19-month- old daughter, heard the sound. Vaughan, like most of the others present, never knew Jensen but came to pay her respects for the man who tried to make her neighborhood a safer place.

Vaughan appointed herself the unofficial caretaker of the memorial bench set up near the location of the shooting, which took place near her home. Every day, she tidies it up and leaves something there. So far, she’s left a teddy bear, two candles and a bouquet of flowers.

“Just to let him know we care,” Vaughan said. “He was trying to protect us. … I wanted to show his wife she has support from the community.”

Thunderstorms that originated in eastern Utah and along the Western Slope formed a squall line that produced damaging winds and power outages across the state Saturday afternoon, according to National Weather Service meteorologist Greg Hanson.